Runaways Vol 1: Pride and Joy

Fashion has always played a large part in determining what goes into comic books, and popular culture has a tendency to feed on and breed with itself. It should come as no surprise then when publishers access the shtick that drives the burgeoning teen TV market.

Six young kids who have nothing in common except that their parents hang out together are suddenly bosom buddies once they discover that those same adults are in fact a team of super-villains intent on world conquest. As all parents can’t be trusted anyway, the kids have no problem banding together to use the powers they didn’t know they had to bring them to justice. The evil adults have manipulative fingers in every pie, however, and frame the kids who have to go on the run…

Playing to the same audiences that buy X-Men and watch the OC, Smallville and Hollyoaks, chock full of whiny, precocious brats taking the puberty-equals-alienation theme to new heights might make this unreadable to anyone whose hormones have stabilised, but in actuality the writing has moments of fun and genuine menace. Sadly the package is woefully betrayed by somewhat mediocre art, which looks a little like animation downloads seen on a screen coated in inch thick dust. Is grey and murky the new Black these days?

This volume originally saw print in the USA as a digest sized edition, and the more substantial page size does a lot to counteract my previous reservations regarding the picture quality.